Monday, October 17, 2011

Email to Nanaimo Social Planner John Horn

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

Date:

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:23:46 -0700

From:

Frank Murphy <frankmurphy@shaw.ca>

To:

john.horn@nanaimo.ca

John: I've been thinking. I'm the first to admit that good does not always follow that but anyway... I've just finished Gabor Maté's remarkable In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and thought I'd share some thoughts.

Before I talk about that though, indulge me for a minute: more with your Urban Planner's hat on than your Social Planner's. I want to offer a perspective that will certainly not be news to you and also will unfortunately offer very little help in the daunting immediate problems you face particularly with the assisted housing initiatives the City and Province are currently undertaking here in Nanaimo. At the same time though I'm sure you'll agree that this perspective has a legitimate place in the discourse. And it's basically this: our single family residential neighbourhoods are part of what can be seen from this vantage point (some 50 or 60 years after their post war beginnings) as an historic social experiment. Demographics and economics were among the dynamic elements at work in their creation. Add the miracle of the internal combustion engine and they seemed to spell salvation from the turmoil and smells and poverty of the inner city. It's probably more than anything the eternal law of unintended consequences that explains the state of the social experiment in the first decades of the 21st century. Nothing characterizes the suburban single family neighbourhood more than its demographic uniformity. Which was in truth at least part of its appeal, wasn't it. I was an exile from North Vancouver almost 20 years ago. We raised our daughter in the wonderful air and civility of North Nanaimo. Though now that she's grown up and moved to Victoria with a VIU BA and BEd tucked under her arm, we've moved downtown to the more dense and diverse Old City...

The new assisted housing facility being built on Wesley isn't generating the opposition that others have in other neighbourhoods and the diversity of the inner city certainly seems to be a reason for this. (Though, while you still have your Urban Planner's hat on I'll take the opportunity to say this: I'm disappointed that this facility and the new City Hall Annex aren't being built as part of a master plan for the Quennell Square precinct. I would have liked to have seen a collaborative effort that included heavy-hitter stakeholders like the City, the provincial Department of Education and others that would have resulted in a national, even international design competition to re-imagine this large site with a strong education and training focus with a mix of income levels, housing types, and a strong institutional presence. Perhaps VIU could have been enticed to participate.)

But I digress... I'm sure you can see the point I'm getting at: that the introduction of any element that tries to retro-fit diversity into our single family neighbourhoods will meet with vocal opposition. We've been building these communities of uniformity for decades and imposing overdue and badly needed change on them will result in loud passionate opposition. So I can't help but ask, What can we do to incrementally address the lack of diversity in these neighbourhoods at the same time? What contributes to neighbourhood, detracts from it?

And some thoughts from having read Dr Maté's wonderful book. You would know better than I the percentage of folks identified as "homeless" that suffer from substance addiction of one kind of another. But I imagine you'd agree that the need for shelter is uniformly not the central problem of those who need help. Underlying crises of addiction; physical and emotional trauma; diagnosable, treatable mental disorders, etc are at the heart of the misery these folks endure. It occurs to me that we need to correctly frame the problem: it's a health care issue. Canada is world famous for our collective commitment to the principle that those in need of medical help, get it. It's one of those things that make us proud to be Canadian. I think it was a mistake to frame this public discussion as one about housing. These valuable facilities are in fact more clinic than shelter where Canadians who need help get it. (In my personal view supervised maintenance of addiction where and until recovery is a viable alternative is included in what is meant by medical help.)

An insight from Dr Maté's book touches on the support environment that contributes to the healing and recovery of people who have slipped through our pretty meager safety nets. With the facilities up and running in neighbourhoods opposed to them, very vulnerable people will find themselves in a hostile environment on a number of levels -- they will of course be sensitive to the animosity in the air but I think as disturbing is finding oneself in the car-oriented suburbs with traffic a blur, walking a hostile, dangerous activity and instead of stopping by the corner store for smokes and chips and getting to know the let's say Vietnamese shopkeeper by name, and he or she you by name, your only alternative is the glossy alienating artifice of the palace of consumerism that is the shopping mall.

Not reason to not do it. But how do we at least begin to make incremental progress on solving some of these problems?

Triumph of the City — How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier / Edward Glaeser

Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong / Alan Broadbent

Urban Planning For Dummies / Jordan Yin

Walkable City — How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time / Jeff Speck

Walking Home — The Life and Lessons of a City Builder / Ken Greenberg

Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — Oil and the End of Globalization / Jeff Rubin

Wrestling with Moses : How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City / Anthony Flint

[The motorcar] exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highway till the open road seemed to become non-stop cities... Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbours became strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run.

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[An abridged excerpt from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs]

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with improvisations.

The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)…

The heart-of-the-day ballet I seldom see, because part of the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks.

Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, shuts up his shop for a while and goes to exchange the time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters the luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts a compliment on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming.

As darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes on under lights, eddying back and forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza dispensary, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop.

Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless something calls them together, like the bagpipe. Who the piper was and why he favored our street I have no idea. The bagpipe just skirled out in the February night, and as if it were a signal the random, dwindled movements of the sidewalk took on direction.

When he finished and vanished, the dancers and watchers applauded, and applause came from the galleries, too, half a dozen of the hundred windows on Hudson Street. Then the windows closed, and the little crowd dissolved into the random movements of the night street.

I have made the daily ballet of Hudson Street sound more frenetic than it is, because writing telescopes it. In real life, it is not that way. In real life, to be sure, something is always going on, the ballet is never at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even leisurely. People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is. I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads — like the old prints of rhinoceroses from travelers' descriptions of rhinoceroses.